AI & Climate Change

AI is continuing what began with crypto mining

The massive growth in artificial intelligence is driving massive growth in datacenters, and they consume enormous amounts of electricity … and cooling water.

My thoughts on this, in no coherent order …

Datacenters produce low quality heat - hot water, not steam. But if coupled with a solar thermal system, is there a desalination angle to this? I bet not, unless maybe you heat pump into the ground to save for cold weather? The problem is horizontal integration - the datacenter in Fremont that needs all this cooling is running at the same time we’re burning gas to heat homes in the winter. Low quality heat is fantastic for home heating if the price is only the cost of the delivery system.

AI is being applied to fusion control. If Helion really is powering a Microsoft datacenter four years from now, as planned, that’s HUGE. If our massive AI spend gets us to one or more functional fusion solutions, that’s a bigger gas changer than us figuring out how to exploit coal, oil, AND natural gas.

So the rectangular orange ponds? That’s a brine production facility. The seawater is let in, then the gate is closed, and it evaporates until it’s extremely concentrated, then pumped out for further processing. Take that hot water in an insulated pipeline from the datacenters to a portion of those ponds, and run them up to the point where they’re hot tub warm all year long. Brine production expands AND they’d be able to turn some of those ponds back into the salt marshes they once were.

If there were some forward looking leadership here in Fremont, this would all fit together neatly - collection pipelines to data centers, distribution to homes and businesses, and a massive output to the brine ponds. It’ll never happen though - by the time the NIMBY, DIMBY, and QUIMBY lawsuits were finally resolved that whole area will be swamped by rising seas.